Reality of Processing - Cyclical?
How much IT space do we need?
- We need scalability and flexibility!
When do we need it?
- As soon as possible or Do not really know!
What type of IT equipment are we going to put in it?
- Blade Servers may be, future equipment do not really know!
What size facility do we need?
- Do we mean size, we really mean capacity for IT equipment!
- Size in sqm or sqft mean nothing unless you state a load!
How many facilities do we need?
- Mirrored ? Scalability ! Separate eggs in Basket!
Where do we locate the facility?
- What to consider, distance away from HQ!
- Real considerations, flood plains, site contamination, fibre, power, planning, EMC, Vibration, Rail proximity, Risk from Airports and flights paths, risk from fuel stores and petrol stations etc…
How much IT space do we need Day 1 And Day 2?
- Capacity and size, do they need to be in the same location?
What engineering loads for power and cooling do I need?
- Do I need special cooling for High Density (HD) equipment?
What engineering resilience do I need?
- N+1, 2N and on what engineering systems and why?
- What autonomy time do I need?
How do we Operate and Maintain the facility?
- What is the life expectancy 5, 10 or 15 years, Do I know
- What is the cost and what do I need in the future?
What is the cost of the facility and how long will it take me to procure it?
- Cost and Programme certainty?
How do I de-risk this whole activity and get on with my day job.
- Why do we as Banking/Media/IT/Accounting/Telecom business what to have this problem
- How do I get the best team?
- How long have I got?
- Do I lease ? Or get someone else to develop this facility for me to own?
Why am I re-inventing the wheel?
- Surely, I am not the first person with this problem!
Why Build a Data Centre?
- To accommodate technology solutions
- To house operational staff
- To provide operational resilience
- To satisfy Business Continuity Requirements
- To provide optimal separation between business operations and supporting systems
Therefore:
Data Centres must be designed around the technology they are required to accommodate
Gone are the days when Data Centres were built, and the question was then asked:
Right, that's done, what do you want to put in here?
Data Centres must be designed to accommodate predicted technology trends over the whole life of the Data Centre
Data Centres must be designed to adapt flexibly to increasingly high processor densities, and resulting power/cooling loads
Technology / Data Centre Trends
- Extensive use of blade servers - currently limited only by power and cooling capacities
- Space requirements are reducing
- Cooling requirements centralised
- Higher density occupancy for equipment
- Better availability of higher speed / affordable communications (e.g. DWDM, up to 400GB/s)
- Bandwidth demand between locations is increasing exponentially
- Typical bandwidths between sites over DWDM are 8GB and above
DWDM = Short for Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing
Technology / Data Centre Trends /Resilience
- Better disaster recovery provisions required
- Regulatory focus on Business Continuity Planning Requirements - Operational Risk
- Current Technology Enables Wide Separation between Business Operations and Supporting Systems Infrastructures
- Requirements for surviving large scale/Metropolitan terrorist attack
- Distance limitations for some technologies are being overcome
- CPU Power / Cooling Loads (Source Gartner)
- Blade Server Racks now can have densities of up to 168 CPUs per Rack
- However, most customers would have difficulty providing more than 10,000 or maybe15,000 watts of electricity to a single rack
- If they were able to do so, they may have problems keeping the equipment cool enough
- Up to 25kW per rack
- Manufacturer Perspective (Source Dell)
- Up to 25KW per Cabinet Power Consumption
- Equivalent to 50KW/sq.m. Net
- Equivalent to 12KW/sq.m. Gross
Impact on Data Centre Design
- 25KW per Cabinet Power Consumption
- Equivalent to 50KW/sq.m. Net
- Equivalent to 12KW/sq.m. Gross
- Potentially over 100Amp/Rack
- A Data Room with 400 Racks would consume 10MW of Power
Conclusions
The proven increase of IT demands validate the projections of M&E capacities
The requirement to support 4.5kW/sq.m. and beyond is now a medium term reality
Until the next step change in technology arrives!
Clearly building to these requirements has to be factored into a practical and realistic model, taking into account:
- Protection of, and Return on, Investment
- Occupancy cost
- Delivery time
- Flexibility / Future proofing
Failure to Plan and Budget adequately would be irresponsible!
1996 - 2005
- Costs measured on £ / sq.ft
2005 - 2006
- Costs measured on £ / rack
2006 onwards
- Reality is we should cost on £ per processor!